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Category Archives: Comment is free
If only Russell Brand could use his cleverness for more than humiliation | Sarah Ditum
The star’s car-crash interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe showcased his talents – and his penchant for lazy sexism
Russell Brand’s appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe show was a car crash all right, but you could see the collision coming a long way off. Put a quick, egotistical comedian into the glossy shambles of a breakfast show, and this is what you get. Brand looks to have come off much the better, but did he really?
Did MSNBC even knew who they were booking? At times it didn’t look like it. The interview starts off badly when host Mika Brzezinski introduces him by saying: “He’s a really big deal, I’m told this … I’m not very up on pop culture.” Brand looks instantly and justifiably pissed off. Then it gets worse.
When Brzezinski leans forward to repair the collapsing table, Brand gets a jab of revenge in by commenting on her cleavage: “I’m only flesh and blood, I’ve got instincts.” Panellist Brian Shachtman starts telling Brand he can’t understand his accent, then the presenters talk about their guest in the third person for a bit, and Katty Kay (the second panellist) bafflingly calls him Willy Brand.
At which point, Brand asks, “Is this what you do for a living?” and then takes over, plugging his tour direct to camera, and initiating a discussion about Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning, before finishing up by highlighting the way Brzezinski is clutching a water bottle and calling her a “shaft grasper”.
Many have praised Brand for his performance on the show, and it’s certainly a showcase of everything he’s got going for him. The bursts of insight smuggled in under the big hair and open shirt, the 10-mile high charisma, and the sharp edge of malice.
Brand has got form when it comes to humiliating women – his previous maverick media exploits have included detailing the sex he had with a young woman on her grandfather’s voicemail, remember – and he really goes for it here. Brzezinski makes a hash of presenting, but Brand goes way below the belt (ahem) when he smirkingly suggests she wants to wank him off.
Ha ha, you have a uterus. Ha ha, you have tits. Ha ha, you’re a lady so I bet you want to touch my cock.
It feels odd to accuse Brand of laziness when he’s so obviously energetic, but that’s exactly what this kind of dull sexism is: lazy. Writing on Thatcher for the Guardian, his criticism of her seemed to revolve around what an unloving mother she must have been.
He’s got much better material than this, so I can only assume that he doesn’t think a female opponent is worthy of his full comic majesty. (He allegedly didn’t think his ex-wife was worthy of more than a text message to inform her he was divorcing her, so maybe there’s a theme.)
That old sexist Samuel Johnson said a woman’s preaching was “like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” Brand is a kind of vertical hound himself: the rock star reprobate image is so well played, anything clever he says is applauded wildly for its novelty. But he is clever, and rather than letting him deploy that smartness as a tactic to ambush people, maybe we should ask him to be clever enough to treat women as people more of the time.
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Robot wars: after drones, a line we must not cross | Christof Heyns
We are on the dangerous threshold of investing in machines the power to make autonomous life-or-death decisions over humans
Drones are becoming dated technology: we may now be able to hand over some of the life-and-death decisions of war to robots.
From the perspective of those engaged in modern warfare, lethal autonomous robots (LARs) offer distinct advantages. They have the potential to process information and to act much faster than humans in situations where nanoseconds could make the difference. They also do not act out of fear, revenge or innate cruelty, as humans sometimes do.
A drone still involves a human “in the loop” – someone, somewhere presses the button. This is slowed down by satellite communications (think of the time-lag when foreign correspondents speak on TV) and these communications can be interrupted by the enemy. So why not take the human “out of the loop”, and install an on-board computer that, independently, is able to identify and to trigger deadly force against targets without human intervention?
There are good reasons to be cautious about permitting this.
On a practical level, it is hardly clear that robotic systems can meet the minimum requirements set by the law of war for lethal decision-making. Popular culture, including sci-fi, celebrates the capabilities of robots, but robots are good at what they do only within a narrow range: their sensors give them tunnel-vision information and they are largely wired for quantitative work.
Soldiers in battle may lawfully target only combatants, and not civilians. Will a computer be able to make the value judgment that a group of people in plain clothing carrying rifles are not enemy combatants but hunters – or soldiers surrendering?
Civilian loss of life as “collateral damage” can be lawful only if it is proportionate to the military objective. This is essentially a qualitative judgement, requiring in many cases experience and common sense and an understanding of the larger picture that robots do not have.
It is also not clear who is to be held responsible if things go wrong. Yet it makes little sense to punish a robot.
The increased availability of weapons that place a state’s soldiers out of harm’s way may make it easier for those states to go to war, and lead to ongoing and global (if low-intensity) warfare – as well as targeted killings. This may have far-reaching implications for the international security system that has saved the last three generations from the scourge of global war.
The overriding question of principle, however, is whether machines should be permitted to decide whether human beings live or die.
Human beings are frail, flawed and, indeed, can be “inhumane”; but they also have the potential to rise above the minimum legal standards for killing. By definition, robots can never act in a humane way. If human beings are taken out of the loop, so are not only the shortcomings of humans, but also our redeeming features.
Robots may, in some respects, not be predictable enough to be used in war: even technicians will not know exactly what to expect from machines that make their own choices, and the average commander in the field who deploys them will be even more at a loss. In other respects, LARs may be too predictable: treating everyone according to the same algorithms means brushing aside the uniqueness of each individual.
But the situation is complex. While LARs pose a clear threat in some cases, there is also the argument that under certain circumstances, using robots may, in fact, save lives. For example, human soldiers who detect movement may fire, afraid it is a sign of enemy soldiers, when, in reality, their “target” may be civilians in hiding. A robotic soldier, which does not fear for its life, may be deployed to go closer and to investigate. Likewise, robots in some cases could more precisely target their fire.
The problem is that even if this is correct, it is not clear that the current laws of war, and the levels of capacity of the soldiers in the field, are sufficient to confine the use of LARs to those situations where they can possibly save lives. But more importantly, does it not demean the value of the lives of each one of us to know that it has become part of the human condition that we could potentially become collateral damage in the calculations of a machine?
This calls for a cool assessment. On the one hand, there is the danger that we overestimate the abilities of computers – because they beat us at chess and maths, we may defer to them regarding decisions that they are not equipped to take. On the other hand, we should not be closed to investigating situations where they can possibly serve to preserve life.
To some extent, we have already given some control to machines over individual targeting decisions with various long-distance weapons. But there is an important, if imperceptible line that we should not cross: humanity should not surrender meaningful control over questions of life and death to machines.
For these reasons, I have called on the United Nations to promote a moratorium on these weapons, and to appoint a high-level panel to advise on whether LARs could be deployed in compliance with relevant international law and, if so, under which circumstances.
UK foreign minister Alistair Burt gave the assurance during a debate on the issue in the House of Commons on 17 June that the UK was not developing such weapons, and had no current plans to do so. The United States took a further step in the right direction when the Department of Defense in November 2012 formalised their position and issued a directive that commanders and operators shall retain “appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force”. These initiatives should be consolidated and other states should be encouraged to follow the same route.
War without ongoing reflection on the human cost is mechanical slaughter. The current prospect of entering a world where machines are explicitly mandated to kill humans should give pause to all of us. While technology rushes forward, we need to take some time out to ensure that not only lives, but also a concept of the value of human life, are preserved in the long term.
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An important lesson for Polish migrants in the Before You Go film | AM Bakalar
A film made in response to the growing number of homeless Poles in the UK is easy to mock, but it does address a problem
Before You Go is a new short film produced by the homelessness organisation The Passage that urges Poles to think carefully before coming to Britain because they may end up living on the streets. The video has received the backing of the British government in conjunction with the Polish embassy.
It tells the story of a young man and a woman whose lives change dramatically after they lose their jobs. With no savings or language skills, they are left destitute. The film shows the young man being set on fire after he is forced to sleep on the streets. It ends with a clear message: if you are planning to come to Britain, make sure you are prepared. Speak the language and bring enough money.
Many have mocked the film’s amateur acting, but it carries an important lesson: there is no doubt that homelessness is becoming a pressing problem among Poles in Britain, especially in London. According to data published in March 2013 by Thames Reach, a homelessness charity, Poles constitute 11% of the total number of homeless in the capital, “by far the biggest number of people from one country other than the UK”.
The foundation Barka UK, which helps eastern European migrants “with the opportunity for reconnection and social reintegration”, has aided close to 3,000 individuals with their return to Poland. In a recent interview on the Polish television channel TVP1, Ewa Sadowska from Barka UK said: “Very often there are cases of whole families that end up on the streets.”
Many migrants do not speak English when they arrive. There are a number of successful Polish companies operating in London that predominantly employ Poles and where the proficiency in English is not a priority, as their clients are mainly other Poles living here. But there is a limit to how many these companies can actually employ.
On websites addressed to the Polish community living here, there are hundreds of job advertisements and an equally large number of people asking for advice on how to get a job. Too often Poles naively assume that compatriots are here to help. While looking at some websites I saw several posts warning about certain companies or conmen.
Sadly, Poles in Britain often prey on the ignorance of a new arrival’s lack of language skills, knowledge of employment law, or sheer desperation. The cases of Poles trafficking Poles to the UK have significantly increased in recent years. For example, in 2011 the Metropolitan police arrested a Polish gang that trafficked 200 Poles into Britain. Not long ago I spoke to a man who had worked for a Polish company that employed him for two years without ever giving him a contract or payslip. He didn’t think there was anything wrong with that as long as he got paid, sometimes in cash.
Britain and Poland’s economic fortunes have changed dramatically in recent years: Britain’s economy has flatlined, and Poland’s comparatively stable performance has lead to a reversal the flow of migration, with many workers from Europe’s south now moving to Poland. But from conversation with Poles in Poland, I am not convinced that they have noticed. With salaries in some remote parts of Poland still low, the possibility of making £1,000 a month is hugely attractive. What people do not realise is that the cost of living in Britain remains far higher than in Poland.
I wish the video had gone a bit further. There are still Poles who come to Britain without realising that this is a very tolerant multi-ethnic society, where people are not expected to be called names on the streets because they have a different skin colour or wear extravagant clothes. I have overheard countless unpleasant conversations in my mother tongue when those who were talking probably thought nobody could understand them. Britain’s liberal attitudes can still be a cultural shock for those arriving from a predominantly white, Catholic and conservative country like Poland.
This is partly about protecting Poles who move to the UK. But it’s also about improving the lives of Britons. On the whole, Britons have been hugely welcoming to Poles – we need to make sure Poles also embrace Britain for what it is.
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Syria and the G8: lost in translation
Mr Putin’s sympathy is with the despots, not their people. It should therefore come as no surprise that the G8 leaders had difficulty arriving at even the blandest of statements on Syria
Shortly after the Boston bombings Barack Obama got a message of support and sympathy from Vladimir Putin. The curiosity of it was that the Russian original was phrased in almost exactly the same words as the message Mr Putin sent to George W Bush after 9/11. Whole sections were lifted straight out of the first message. And this one was intended to be read by a different president in radically different times. Except that in the Russian leader’s mind, they are not. Whether it is in Chechnya or Boston, or indeed in Woolwich, the common enemies that the civilised world is facing, in Mr Putin’s view, are jihadis, and Sunni Islamist ones at that. With the confidence of an operative from the Russian security establishment who knows about such things, Mr Putin said at the end of the G8 meeting that there were loads of criminals fighting for the Syrian opposition who could commit brutal murders against British soldiers.
Maybe there are, but this is a view that precludes the legitimacy of popular uprisings against tyrannies, least of all in the Arab world; thinks the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions were CIA plots; and takes all threats of regime change personally. Mr Putin’s sympathy is with the despots, not their people. It should therefore come as no surprise that the G8 leaders had difficulty arriving at even the blandest of statements on Syria, which – the world can safely assume – will be lost all too quickly in translation. Some will say that the communique contains a hint that the rebels’ backers differentiate between the Assad clan and the military and security services of the Syrian state. But equally well that statement could be parsed in Damascus and Moscow as one that blocks Assad’s removal.
The conference also leaves large lacunas in the British, French and US positions, all rhetorically in favour of an early peace conference in Geneva – even if the military help they are providing on the ground points to an older pre-civil-war agenda. Even if he wanted to, David Cameron could not assemble an agreed list of Syrian opposition leaders to sit down in talks about a transitional authority, because – even after 25 months, and 93,000 deaths – many of them are at daggers drawn and spend their time denouncing each other.
There remain substantial differences of opinion inside Washington, and between Washington and London and Paris, about what arms to give the rebels. Mr Obama has reluctantly, and in our view wrongly, come to the view that overtly arming the rebels is the least worst option, whereas Mr Cameron and François Hollande have been enthusiastic interveners all along. It is hard to say what signal the end of the EU arms embargo sends to Assad, other than to ask the Russians and the Iranians to match that supply of weapons – which they are only too willing to do, and capable of doing. All this points to a continuation and deepening of the conflict just as it has become internationalised and sectarianised by the involvement of Hezbollah. If there is to be a peace conference in the future, the communique is really saying it will only be decided by lines drawn by armies on the ground. That points to a permanently divided country.
Before Syria, Mr Cameron’s three stated aims for the summit could be boiled down to tax, trade and transparency. On each, the talk was better than the action. A giant round of negotiations between the US and Europe is now under way – but it did not need this week’s summit as a kickstarter. The same goes for the prime minister’s deal on openness with British tax havens. A new direction of travel has been set on tax avoidance at Fermanagh, that much is clear. But a bold and firmly worded agreement? Sadly, no.
A breakthrough did come on Tuesday, but it had nothing to do with talks in Fermanagh. It was that Washington had agreed to drop a series of preconditions that previously held back negotiations over the future of Afghanistan and that talks with the Taliban were back on again. The omens now are that same might have to happen for Syria.
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Brazil protesters have had enough | Conor Creighton
A bus fare increase was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Brazilians are tired of waiting for their country to be reformed
For pedestrians São Paulo became a rare kind of paradise on Monday night. The protest being called the “free pass movement” meant for once in this car mad capital, the walkers had right of way.
There were close to 80,000 of us on the streets of the city. I was there to report but also to protest. I’m about to marry a Brazilian. This place in my future.
The protest met at Largo da Batata and then, marching in four different directions, they slowed the traffic down until there were 250km of tailbacks and the city was tangled up in traffic chaos that lasted till midnight.
Four nights before they’d tried to do the same thing but the police attacked with teargas and rubber bullets. One minute the crowd were chanting “no violence”, the next they were firing right at us. We got herded between a fence and a sheer drop on to a motorway. People were crying, from teargas and from terror. Other protesters reached over the fence and pulled us free. It was the kind of citizen heroics you see in a blockbuster, but hope you’ll never have to witness in real life.
That was the background. A series of much smaller protests over a 20 centavo increase in the bus fare had been met by ferocious police violence. They deliberately went for the journalists. Firing into the press pack and shooting at photographers on balconies. They ran through the crowds, they raided bars and cafes. They made hundreds of arrests. They sent in the cavalry. Passersby caught up in the madness were shot at. More than a hundred people were injured.
The governor of São Paulo, Geraldo Alckmin, was in Paris the whole time. From there he called the protesters vandals and troublemakers.
So last night, with people enraged by what they’d seen in the media reports, there were protests in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, Porto Alegre, Belém, Salvador and Maceió. A quarter of a million Brazilians took to the streets. In Brasilia they climbed on to the roof of parliament. In Rio they set fire to the assembly. But with just a few exceptions every one of the protests passed peacefully.
Some people are calling this a civil war between the people and the politicians. The 20 centavos was the straw that broke the camel’s back. A back that’s been trembling for some time.
In spite of the economic surge in Brazil the country is still unfair, and horribly corrupt. Politicians earn 28 times the minimum wage. Their expenses, which are reimbursed, can run as high as their salaries. And to put it in context, the minimum wage isn’t only for low-skilled Brazilians: teachers too don’t earn much more than that either.
The health service, the education system and the police service are all in need of a big fix.
The centre left government, Partido dos Trabalhadores, was voted in on a wave of warmth, idealism and promises to do just that in 2002. But the accusations waved on placards and flags last night showed clearly that for many people the warmth has gone.
“Keep your World Cup – we want education and health”, “It’s not about 20 centavos – it’s about dignity”, “The people have woken up”.
The stereotype of protest in Brazil is the children of the rich out in the street waving placards as a rite of passage. It’s all too easy to sneer at. But what’s happening now is very different. There are families in the marches. There are older people too. There are middle-class kids and there are kids from poor communities. They’re all singing the same song, “Come to the streets”. It works. They come.
President Dilma was booed during her opening speech at the Confederations Cup. Protesters camped outside the home of Governor Alckmin. “Don’t worry,” they chanted, “we’ll still be here when you get back from Paris.”
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John Sentamu and the Church of England’s slow retreat on gay marriage | Andrew Brown
The archbishop of York’s anti-gay marriage speech articulates the view of a church that drowned out liberal voices 20 years ago
The archbishop of York’s speech against equal marriage in the House of Lords on Monday represents another step in the Church of England’s stumbling retreat on the issue, and does a lot to illuminate the reasons that it was defeated. I wrote “equal marriage” because the church has now accepted that gay marriage is coming, and that lasting gay relationships can be godly. It just wants to call them something other than marriages, and still feels this matters.
The archbishop, John Sentamu, asked: “What do you do with people in same-sex relationships that are committed, loving and Christian? Would you rather bless a sheep and a tree, and not them? However, that is a big question, to which we are going to come. I am afraid that now is not the moment.”
No. It isn’t. That moment passed years ago, when civil partnerships were first brought in, and the archbishop’s was one of the loudest voices demanding that the Church of England have nothing to do with them. The bishops still don’t realise what damage they did then.
Even the supposedly liberal Rowan Williams said the other week, while lecturing on the fifth anniversary of his sharia speech, that “I am not wholly clear to what problem same-sex marriage is the answer” – at which my neighbour whispered: “He’s an idiot if he doesn’t know the problem is not listening to gay people.”
So Williams is an idiot on this subject. And so is his colleague in York, and both for the same reason, very damning to Christians: they failed to listen to the weak because they thought the noisy bullies mattered more.
When civil partnerships came in, the two archbishops fought hard, along with the rest of the Church of England, to ensure that they had no religious or spiritual content at all. This was a monumentally stupid position for an established church to take, and the nation duly went ahead and injected its own spiritual contents, leaving the church looking like a whitewashed tomb.
Of course, it looks like frightful bad taste to say this now, flogging a dead horse and all of that. Yet I have a particular reason for doing so, and this is that the Cambridge college dean who married me and my wife, 25 years ago, was also the first Christian I knew to point out that the church should be marrying gay people as well as divorced ones, like me. “What we have to ask,” he said, “is whether a gay couple can be a means of grace to one another.”
In the late 80s this was still a startling question. The only out gay media person I then knew was Peter Ackroyd at the Spectator, and one of our colleagues there was a Sloaney woman who trilled “Have you heard about the miracle of Aids? It turns fruits into vegetables!” The Independent’s sports desk had a bonding ritual involving elaborate homophobic abuse: “Sausage jockey? He’s the Lester Piggott of the chipolata circuit,” one man used to say who later became a celebrated liberal commentator.
Yet here was the dean of Trinity College, a figure at the heart of the established church and one of the very few Christian intellectuals I have known who kept his acts and his beliefs in harmony, telling me that equality was a Christian imperative. That was how the dons who then ran the church thought, and quietly acted.
But they never understood that power was passing from the dons, within the church as well as outside it. When the great evangelical backlash against gay people came in the 90s – culminating in 1998, when opposition to gay rights became one of the tests of orthodoxy within the Anglican communion and the main cause of its subsequent schism – the dons were all swept away. Williams, than whom no one could be more donnish, was also completely powerless in these matters, partly as a result of his own disastrous choices.
Retreating from the actual condition of the Church of England full of gay and tolerant people into a fantasy of an Anglican communion that had neither but would be “a global significant player” as George Carey once told the United Nations, the evangelical party made a church which could neither lead the nation morally nor even move with it and made instead a virtue of being out of touch. Looking at their church now, I remember Kipling’s brutal epigram on a soldier shot for cowardice: “I could not face my death. This being known, / men led me to him, blindfold and alone.”
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Dale Cregan’s costly security was a high-speed farce | Eric Allison
His crimes were shocking, but Cregan was not likely to be sprung. Police spending £5m on taking him to court was a cynical tactic
A row over the security costs of the Dale Cregan trial has broken out between Greater Manchester police and the National Offender Management Service, with the police and crime commissioner, Tony Lloyd, backing the police.
The cost of ferrying him and his co-defendants on the daily round trip between Strangeways prison in central Manchester and Preston crown court was £5m. Three prison vans, travelling at high speed and escorted by four or five police cars and a police helicopter, carried him on the daily, 70-mile round trip. Other “dummy” prison vans set off as decoys each day. (The vans were involved in at least three accidents during the trial process, due to the high speed and the vans’ closeness to each other to stop vehicles coming in between them.)
More than 150 armed police officers and scores of private security guards (employed by the ubiquitous G4S) were involved every day.
The police say they asked the National Offender Management Service to reclassify Preston prison as a high-security jail to hold the defendants during the trial. They refused, saying it would be too difficult and costly. But why was such a high level of security needed in the first place?
Despite the enormity of his crimes, Cregan was a small-time criminal, not a member of an organised crime gang or terrorist, and the notion of him being “sprung” from custody is ludicrous. Nobody knew that more than Manchester’s police. All their intelligence on Cregan would have shown this, but the high-speed farce was played out in public throughout the 19-week trial.
This is not new; the police have always over-egged the security pudding in high-profile criminal trials. It is a ploy designed to influence juries – “look at all the armed officers needed to guard this defendant. He must be dangerous, therefore must be guilty.”
This is not just my view: a former high-ranking officer in the Metropolitan police, who had responsibility for escorting high-risk prisoners, says he tried to reduce the numbers involved in these convoys and that “the police love to overdo these things”.
And in terms of influencing the Cregan jury, the police surely overplayed their hand. It was not necessary to convince them that Cregan was dangerous and guilty; he was on camera in one of his gun and grenade attacks and was filmed walking into a police station and admitting that he had killed the two police officers. In effect, that was the moment he started to serve his whole-life sentence. There was no need for the costly security showboating.
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Australia can lead the way for intersex people | Morgan Carpenter
Morgan Carpenter: Our lives are medicalised, and our voices rarely heard. If the sex discrimination amendment bill passes, this will be a huge win for all of usMorgan Carpenter
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The first world war was far from futile | Gary Sheffield
Planning next year’s first world war centenary, we shouldn’t rely on Wilfred Owen’s version of events
In announcing details of the official programme of commemorations for the centenary of the first world war, Maria Miller, the culture secretary, was careful to say the government would simply “set out the facts” about the origins of the conflict without any interpretation. I am not the only historian to be uneasy about this. The government, through its silence, is tacitly endorsing the popular view of the war as a futile one, a belief that is sharply at odds with most modern scholarship, and with how it was perceived at the time.
Britain went to war with Germany in August 1914 for similar reasons to those which the country fought Hitler’s Germany in the second world war: to prevent an authoritarian, militarist, expansionist enemy achieving hegemony in Europe and thus imperilling British security. Most historians argue that Germany and Austria-Hungary were primarily responsible for initiating the war (recent attempts to blame Russia are not wholly convincing). Whoever started it, the fact is that in 1914-18, Germany waged a war of aggression that conquered large tracts of its neighbours’ territory. As has often been pointed out, there were distinct continuities between the policy and strategy of imperial Germany and its Nazi successor. In the first world war, German refusal to seriously contemplate handing back the fruits of its aggression rendered null any attempt to bring about a negotiated peace. Not until Germany was clearly losing on the battlefield in 1918 did Berlin show any flexibility over this issue, and by then it was too late.
This was not a “cabinet war”, remote from the concerns of ordinary people. Niall Ferguson’s argument of the late 1990s that Germany was essentially benign and Berlin’s victory would have led to “the Kaiser’s European Union” has failed to convince the academic mainstream. Rather, the first world war was an existential struggle, just as much a war of national survival for the British as the second world war. If Britain and its allies had lost, it would have meant the end of liberal democracy on mainland Europe. As it was, civilians were kept docile in German-occupied France and Belgium by the routine use of terror. Forced labourers were deported to Germany under terrible conditions. Unlike Hitler’s regime, the Kaiser’s was not consciously genocidal, but it was aggressive and brutal enough. In 1918 the British army was fighting a war of liberation.
If Germany had won the first world war Britain, although probably safe from invasion thanks to the Royal Navy, would have been reduced to a state of siege, shut out of Europe. As British planners recognised during the first world war, had London been forced to come to terms with a victorious Germany, any peace could only have been temporary. Sooner or later Germany would have renewed the war and Britain and its empire would have been at a terrible disadvantage.
There is plenty of evidence that most ordinary British people understood what was at stake and, just as in 1939-45, more or less willingly committed to the struggle. The idea of mass war enthusiasm in August 1914 has been shown to be something of a myth. Instead, as the gravity of the situation became clear, there was a more nuanced response. One of the reasons why the support of the working classes for the war was so strong, even among those that lived in poverty, was the knowledge that they were better off than their parents and grandparents had been, and so had something to lose. The juxtaposition of the harsh terms imposed by Germany on Russia in March 1918, far harsher than those of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, and the major German offensive of the same month, which seemed to bring the Allies to the brink of defeat, stiffened resolve among the industrial working classes. The war was seen as terrible, but defeat was worse.
Today, horrified by the casualties of 1914-18, (which were consistent with losses of other belligerents), we tend to see the conflict in terms of what the war poet Wilfred Owen called the “pity of war“. This is right and proper, but we should not lose sight of why the war was fought and the significance of the fact that it was Britain and its allies, and not Germany, that emerged victorious. Like all wars, it was tragic, but it was certainly not futile.
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Below the Line: showcasing our world news commenters
Do you frequently comment on the Guardian’s world coverage? Tell us about yourself for a special edition of our series
If all the world’s indeed a stage, several countries have been claiming their fair share of the spotlight this month. We’ve seen rapid developments the civil war in Syria, protests in Turkey, US negotiations with China on cyber security, and the US government grappling with revelations of NSA surveillance and its international repercussions.
With all that’s been going on, we want to highlight some of the action taking place in the comments of our live blogs and articles on world events.
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